diorama

I don’t know if I have ever mentioned my fascination with taxidermy in all its various forms? If not, I have a special place in my heart for stuffed animals, bones, dried specimen and other oddities and when the diorama project took off, I knew that I had to have all those things in there as well. Because it is a laboratory / study for a magical scientist and not having those things would be a shame.
My main issue with the diorama has always been that I want clutter, like a lived-in clutter that accumulates after centuries of usage of the same room. I can do clutter irl quite easily but with dolls I always find I strive to show everything clearly in a picture which is not possible with the sort of clutter I want to achieve. So uh, constant fight against my inner self here xD

The left side of my diorama had felt a bit empty with only the white shabby chic-esque trunk and since I just couldn’t find a nice arker trunk in a style I wanted, I started to look at other options. My first try was a fireplace that I foolishly tried to make myself based on this fireplace.

Lol yeah no. There was an attempt, gold star for that but no. Unfortunately my usual MO in terms of new furniture got me no fireplace (but instead the urge to make an old style kitchen complete with iron stove) so I turned to other options. I then settled on getting a ‚Buffetschrank‘ – I don’t think there is a specific term for this in English? Basically in German it is a term for a shelf unit that is mainly used to store / display your dishes. What I went for is a more spartan option without any fancy glass doors and stuff, just simple wood and shelves which ended up being a good choice. The first version of this thing actually displayed my pewter teasetsknown from this entry. I quickly came to the realisation that this just would not do as it looked so off with the other stuff in the study so I began to ponder about other options.

This actually got me to think of Stephanus as a character as he is – besides being a god, hellbent on world domination, a loving father and prolly a bit nuts – first and foremost a scientist with an urge to know and to understand everything. So when I think of his study / lab, I think of the space of someone who has a lot of clutter from researching everything at once, a lot of books and other stuff and all ingridents you might need within reach of at least one surface used for essentially research itself.

So then I just killed my curio cabinet and moved all stuff into the new shelf unit, lol.

I am mildly in love with how natural it looks and how lived in!

The downsides are now that I had to switch the phonograph with the curio cabinet for spaces sake and the curio cabinet is now super empty and I have no real idea what to put in it. Same goes for the top of the desk as I stole a lot of things from that place as well.

So the next step will be to fill the void of those things – I have a few ideas!